111–120 of 173 posts
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...what?
SJW Social Justice Warrior. A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation. A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typica…
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
ExoClickπ[1] was one of the ad networks (if not the only one) used by The Pirate Bay to monetize. [1] https://www.exoclick.com
Edit: typo
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
That's decidedly not true.
Per your example:
> Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
The people responsible for dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima were not considered criminals and did not go to jail or get punished at all.
War acts are always rationalized by their consequences and the intent behind them.
But this is way off-topic.
Someone already mentioned that copyright laws do indeed distinguish between "commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement".
Actually, I'd argue that even ethically they are treated differently.
If I bought a movie then shared it with my friends, no one would think I'm doing something that's unethical.
If I started selling or renting that movie to my classmates, it's more controversial.
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Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists. Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work. I don't underst…
"I don't understand why we should hold back progress"... I don't think we should hold back progress. I'm not arguing for legislated compulsory DRM or shutting down the Internet. I'm just saying I don't have a lot of love or sympathy for people who build businesses on the appropriation of peoples' hard work against their will. I feel the same way about jerks who take OSS software closed without authorization or credit…
I agree with you that it's troubling that a new model for monetizing free work isn't coalescing -- in art, open source, writing, and more. I've personally felt the sting of all of these.
However, I don't blame the downloaders or the Pirate Bays. People want what they want, and Pirate Bay managed to provide that to people: a download index for the price of an ad or a drive-by download. I congratulate them on their success.
I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable, even if it maybe was yesterday. Perhaps this means that the local band will have to pack away their guitars while the one-hit wonder Gangnam Styles rake in the bucks, but nobody is being screwed here.
What society wants from entertainment has evolved, and holding onto a static definition of what constitutes "art", "quality", or "enriching one's life" while ignoring what real people are clearly demanding from their entertainment is, I think, pretentious.
I don't think the internet is destroying anything or screwing anyone. It's just closing gaps and optimizing every industry towards exactly what people want; if that's thrown-together garbage delivered for free at the cost of promotions shoved into your eyeballs, then don't blame the internet, or Pirate Bay. Blame people for consuming crap and blindly selling their souls to ads.
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I disagree... Sharing has been part humanity since the dawn of the human race. It is just easier to share things with more people now.
That's a variant of "information wants to be free," which is an argument from the naturalistic fallacy. The question isn't "what's natural" or "what's easy." It's "what benefits the human condition?" Do we want a culture where artists can make careers out of creating great art, or do we want a culture where there's no money in that so it doesn't get done by anyone except trust fund kids and people who are willing to…
To me it's very similar to the war on drugs... Policy and business models need to change. There are always people resistant to change as they want to protect their revenue streams.
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.
Plenty of specific crimes, do, in fact, have seeking a material reward/exchange as a required element of the offense, and the act that is criminal when done for profit is legal (or, if still illegal, illegal under a different provision which often has a lesser punishment) when done without that exchange.
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
Exactly. They may or may not have actually broken the law, but they are certainly in spirit a service that makes money through the unauthorized monetization of other peoples' works against the wishes of those works' creators. Even if it doesn't make them criminals, it certainly makes them assholes. It's already hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician, etc. without being kneecapped by opportunists. We've g…
In general you make some valid points and I think I understand where you're coming from - as an artist. I strongly believe though, that the pre-Internet system screwed artists because the Internet itself did not exist.
The screwing is coming from the music industry itself. People are still paying for music, it is still (and probably more than ever) a multi billion business. Yet, true, authentic talent don't get the attention/compensation they deserve, why?
Because the big players control who gets what. And that's what they're trying to do when fighting internet piracy, control the distribution. They're not interested in small time artists, they're not fighting for you.
I truly believe that all small time artists should embrace the internet, it's their only true hope to get the attention they deserve, for free. Money will come afterwards. After all, a few companies and a few more monkeys probably get more money than the rest 95%, the internet can split some of that more equally.
EDIT: syntax, trying to make sense
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Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them. Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.
You mean, like Google? Of course, they remove the results that are DMCA-d, but in the mean time, 10 new links appear.
Google's business is not centered around providing pirated material. The fact that it happens is accidental.
The pirate bay, on the other hand, (as clearly suggested by its name), does infact center around providing access to pirated material.
The organisation that reported Thepiratebay and therefore is the reason for this raid is called Rättighetsalliansen (The Alliance of Rights). The Alliance of Rights is the same organisation as The Anti Pirate Bureau but with a new name. This is what they say on their website (roughly translated): "The police raided The Pirate Bay today inside an Internet company in the Stockholm region. Rättighetsalliansen is behind…
Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are Knowingly and willingly facilitating crime is usually a crime in itself. As a clear example, if you pay a hitman to kill someone, you didn't do the killing, but you facilitated the crime.